logoalt Hacker News

dijittoday at 6:33 AM1 replyview on HN

its also the fact that a lot of fundamental systems work in trade offs.

Do you want performance, or correctness.

Well, if you want performance you use write through caching and in the case of distributed storage: more nodes confirming the block before returning. Huge performance cost.

Outsourcing this just means someone else makes these tradeoffs, they will prioritise the general case- and they’re even more incentivised to move the needle towards things that are most visible to the end user.

In this case, performance.

You won’t notice that theres a third commit server off-site (unless that site is bombed), but you will notice slower writes- and the general case says that people will express comparative dissatisfaction with weaker performance and use it as a justification to use another provider.


Replies

dijittoday at 11:32 AM

if you want correctness* you use write through caching.

My mistake, if you want performance you choose write-back caching, and fewer nodes need to acknowledge the write. Sorry for clumsily typing the inverse when I was in a morning haze waking up :(